What Slack is doing to our offices—and our minds

Reminds me of the Lean blight that was foisted on my employer. All these metrics that turned out to be worse than not having metrics. They can claim all sorts of boosts to productivity. But to say not having meetings means teams are more productive is bunk. I know, it's like talking about Congress. Meetings are detriments to productivity. But that's because meeting leaders are not doing their jobs.

Went through similar LEAN hell at Boeing. LEAN is a manufacturing process improvement methodology and it doesn't really work very well in an office context, IMO—and I consider that an informed opinion, after dealing with LEAN for many years. There's a shitload of consulting dollars out there to be made in trying to implement LEAN, and as with all of these CPI-type methods there are gains to be made under appropriate circumstances, but it was just demoralizing and terrible in the long term.

I have worked remotely for 15 years. I find instant messaging is highly disruptive. Anything that derails me from a task means more time to re-orient when I go back to it.

Communication by text does have a role. Outside of my work, we have meetings using Ventrilo (which is a crappy program by the way and this should not be taken as an endorsement). That combines voice and text. Voice is much faster for conveying the same information, but having the text channel also available helps bring up additional points or questions without interrupting, makes it easy to share links and other information, and provides a place for side chatter. You can also PM for side chatter. I think the combination of text and voice has a big advantage over either alone. But I definitely prefer to contain them to a designated meeting period so I can get other things done independently.

Of course not everyone is well suited for remote work. It's possible that having a more continuous communication channel makes it easier for people who otherwise would not be productive that way.

Gah. Can someone please get Newitz an editor? I mean, grammar is a thing. I really want to finish reading this article- the subject matter is interesting/relevant and Newitz seems to have had first-hand access to their offices. But it just takes too much concentration to sift through her many misaligned phrases and misused conjunctions.

We use HipChat at work because Slack was a magnitude of order more expensive, and it's universally hated. The non-tech folks hate its reliance on the cloud and its god-awful native clients, and the tech folks hate its reliance on the cloud and lack of flexibility. We still use IRC for community channels.

> Other Ars staffers, like policy editor Joe Mullin, find that Slack has helped them get a lot more serious about work. Joe never used IRC, partly because there was only one channel where people could talk to each other. Once we had Slack, David Kravets created a #policy channel where Mullin could meet with the other wonk-minded staffers to discuss patent trolls and PACER hacks.

This particularly caught my attention. What exactly prevented Joe from doing that on IRC? Creating a channel is as hard as joining one. What was he missing?

Also, I get that this is a Slack profile, but considering that it touches on how Slack has no competition, can we get some news on FOSS like Mattermost, or Vector.im/Matrix, or Zulip, or Let's Chat?

Fricken Silicon Valley weirdos with their echo chamber culture. I've never even heard of this Slack, I doubt it is much known at all outside the tech sector, and even within it probably isn't as widespread as you seem to think. And it certainly isn't important enough to warrant a 4 page article.

This will be my last comment on a Newitz article. But please, Ars. I've been a regular reader for 8 + years. I'm begging you.

+1 to this.

It's like we are listening to her talk informally about it, but this is not a verbal conversation, it is written. We don't speak like we write. Interesting topic, needs some serious editing cause it is hard to read as written.

I don't get the hate. This was a long article which could have been broken up into a series of smaller ones, but it was interesting to see first-hand impressions of the company, the roadmap for future investments (apps, always apps... and appstores, bah), but also some insights into Ars Technica office culture. I enjoyed reading this.

I'm a relative newcomer to Slack (not many academics use it). But on a project-by-project basis, it's great for tech-savvy collaborations to do with publishing and sharing research. For involved academic projects, email is often a productivity sink. So anything that can reduce the number of short, immediately answerable emails, or develop ideas in (near) real time, really helps. I wish some of the older researchers I have to collaborate with were more tech savvy. BTW I'm not in ComSci or any science department - but I could see how it would be useful for collaborating on papers, say.

Hate is a strong word. And the critique here has nothing to do with the subject matter. The author, regardless of their education/credentials, decided to use a very informal (dare I say Slack-ish) style for their article, which might've worked better for shorter copy. But for an article of this length, I agree it's difficult to read, and feels a bit unrigorous.

I personally, when using just normal email at work, get a jumpy when someone uses smiley faces. When everyone word you write can and will be used against you, you need to more careful than... showing emotion. Thats just how the game is played.

Slack needs to be able to disable emoji for government, and the fact the owner was dissapointed they were withheld tells me he doesnt understand government.

It's both scary and amusing how government workers act like characters from "Equilibrium". I agree that emotions generally have negative impacts on good decision making, but its also what makes us human. Restricting communications doesn't make the emotional aspects go away.

It isn't about emotions felt, it is about emotions shown. When anything shown in text can become a headline, you self censor what you write.

I really REALLY dislike Slack, though I don't think it's the fault of the software particularly. It just comes down to lack of adoption and fragmentation, as others have pointed out. Adding Slack to the mix doesn't mean any of my coworkers have stopped used Outlook, or Lync, or Jira, or Confluence, or Salesforce tickets, or whatever their tool of choice is. It just means there's yet another place I have to keep an eye on, yet another inbox to check, yet another app to have slowly eating the battery on my phone and my laptop and taking up precious dock space so Bob in Sales can use an emoji and feel hip and dynamic.

Classic roll-out problem. The technology is one thing, but just plopping on top of all the communication modes everyone is already juggling doesn't provide for successful adoption, nor does it speak well for those in charge. At a former employer of mine, they decided to inflict Yammer on their employees by edict, and to support the investment (IT had unilaterally decided that Yammer was The Shit) the execs indicated they would only be communicating to people by Yammer. People just stopped communicating, and eventually that channel disappeared.

Fricken Silicon Valley weirdos with their echo chamber culture. I've never even heard of this Slack, I doubt it is much known at all outside the tech sector, and even within it probably isn't as widespread as you seem to think. And it certainly isn't important enough to warrant a 4 page article.

I've heard of Slack... but yep, this is another one of those things I just don't get, and out here is Businessland people who don't visit sites like Ars will die happily not knowing what the new trendy 'social business app' is.

This is part of what I was concerned about when reading the article. The notion of replacing e-mail in most offices; ludicrous. I've not used Slack, but this article convinced me I'd hate it.

You guys are reading too much into that - it replaces a lot of inter-office email where you just need to ask someone a question or announce a change to people; you can instead just ask them directly on slack, or announce in a channel. It doesn't fully replace every use of email ever.

I use Slack heavily at work. It's OK. The article used a lot of words to describe what is pretty much just an instant messaging (IM) program. It's a bit better than most - particularly for messaging groups of people. Yeah, you can attach files (which is nice) and use plugins for some stuff (also nice).

I'm not aware of anything better on the market for IMing my coworkers. Not that I've looked too much.

Unfortunately, Slack is fundamentally flawed. It (like most IM programs) is oriented around who you're conversing with (whether an individual or a group), rather than around conversations. Channels aren't threaded, there's no way to loop other people into a conversation, and there's no way to drop out of a conversation you find isn't relevant to you (or has drifted to another topic).

Google's Wave had the right idea, but sadly was abandoned in its infancy. It was adopted by Apache, but they don't seem to have done anything with it.

This is part of what I was concerned about when reading the article. The notion of replacing e-mail in most offices; ludicrous. I've not used Slack, but this article convinced me I'd hate it.

You guys are reading too much into that - it replaces a lot of inter-office email where you just need to ask someone a question or announce a change to people; you can instead just ask them directly on slack, or announce in a channel. It doesn't fully replace every use of email ever.

Yep. This replaces the "Hey, can you swing by my desk when you get a chance" or "I'm going to be 5 minutes late to the meeting, please let everyone else know" emails.

I think it's pretty ironic that the software whose greatest feature (it seems to me) is allowing easy and targeted communication between workings without having to have a destructive "open office" environment...has an open office environment.

Compound that irony with the fact that they're writing software for a virtual office in an actual office.

The problem with any new communications tool to replace email is that eventually the same people who ruined email will get accounts on the new system and ruin that too.

I don't understand how this is any better than IRC (which supports private messages, too): IRC has plenty of no-fuss clients that the technically illiterate can use just fine - even webchat if necessary.

It's better because it's in the cloud....

I can't make up my mind whether to up vote or down vote... If that comment is meant as sarcasm then definitely an up vote. If that was meant seriously then definitely a down vote. Nothing is better because it's in the cloud, quite the opposite usually.

If I really need to chat online then just give me IRC and to hell with all the "new and improved" variants.

edited to add - and there is no way in hell slack could "replace" email, even internally. Email at ars is the official way of communicating anything of importance, since it leaves a record. Slack is for ephemeral blahblah stuff. Slack can certainly cut down on the need to use email for every bit of talking, but it's insane to think of it as an email replacement.

I'm glad you mentioned that Lee, because I think Ars' policy that email is the "official" form of communication is invaluable. It eliminates all potential bullshit like, "Didn't you see this policy change in slack?" Which translates to: "Why weren't you in the channel all day monitoring it for important notifications?"

This is part of what I was concerned about when reading the article. The notion of replacing e-mail in most offices; ludicrous. I've not used Slack, but this article convinced me I'd hate it.

You guys are reading too much into that - it replaces a lot of inter-office email where you just need to ask someone a question or announce a change to people; you can instead just ask them directly on slack, or announce in a channel. It doesn't fully replace every use of email ever.

Which is my point exactly. If it doesn't replace any of those things, then all it is is an overhyped chat app. I've already got a half dozen of those I'm expected to pick and chose from depending on who I want to reach, so adding Slack does absolutely zero to improve my workflow - it just confuses it further.

Slack has helped at Ars, I think, since the barrier to entry is a lot lower than with IRC for folks without a deep tech background (not to pick on Joe, but yeah, it was hard supporting some of the ars staffers with IRC). The end result is more collaboration, and that's mostly a good thing since we're all distributed and we all work from home.

But honestly, slack is a lot less flexible than IRC and I don't like it as much. Their bot integration is weak sauce and not as powerful as IRC bots (in fact, the vast majority of our bot functionality is still done with an IRC bot that hooks into slack via its IRC gateway). Slack really is just IRC + instant messaging + cloud storage for files, all rolled into one app—with the added bonus of taking control of your messaging out of your hands and putting it into the hands of a 3rd party company that might or might not be compelled by LEOs or other entities to release your data without telling you.

And the whole "we keep all of your logs but you have to be on a paid plan to see them" sucks. I mean, I get it—it's a great revenue hook!—but even at $7 a head per month for the cheapest paid plan, we'd be in the hole for thousands of dollars per year if we were subscribing. And that's, shit, I don't know, 20x the cost of maintaining our own IRC server at our colo, even with admin overhead factored in. The value prop is super SUPER weak.

So I guess I am a reluctant slacker. It's good we're using it, because it's lowered communication friction and gotten more authors participating in the daily news flow, but IMO it's just flat-out inferior to IRC and XMPP IM.

edited to add - and there is no way in hell slack could "replace" email, even internally. Email at ars is the official way of communicating anything of importance, since it leaves a record. Slack is for ephemeral blahblah stuff. Slack can certainly cut down on the need to use email for every bit of talking, but it's insane to think of it as an email replacement.

I can't make up my mind whether to up vote or down vote... If that comment is meant as sarcasm then definitely an up vote. If that was meant seriously then definitely a down vote. Nothing is better because it's in the cloud, quite the opposite usually.

I would disagree; the shared/searchable message logs are fantastic. Being able to look up old conversations is invaluable. While you can do that with email, you can't do that so easily with IRC.

Which is my point exactly. If it doesn't replace any of those things, then all it is is an overhyped chat app. I've already got a half dozen of those I'm expected to pick and chose from depending on who I want to reach, so adding Slack does absolutely zero to improve my workflow - it just confuses it further.

If it isn't consistently applied, your point is correct. In our office, Slack is the only chat program anyone uses to communicate.

Back in September, my daughter, newly in grade 9, was typing away on her notebook. I asked what she was up to, and she said, "Slack." I said, "What?" "Seriously, old man, it's how we coordinate homework."

That's the first time (and, let's face up to it, it's not going to be the only time) I was generation-gapped by my kids with regards to technology.

Later, I saw her revising a complicated-looking text document in Google Docs. She said that she and some friends were putting together the definitive study guide for her group by combining a few kids' notes.

Seriously? Seriously? That's a hard copy, red pen, and swearing time for me.

I feel old.

Fortunately, I don't feel useless yet since I'm still the only one in the house who can network all the gadgets together.

What drives me nuts are when people use email for time-sensitive communication, as if it were an IM client (managers especially). I get it; they are in a meeting and probably thumbing through their email at the time... but it you start checking your inbox frequently enough to use it for IM, you may as well not be working.

I liked my former boss, but he had a nasty habit of emailing about something, and then immediately walking over to my desk to ask if I've read his email. Then he would want to talk about it, realize he missed some things, then send another email with extra info. That does not make productivity, that makes a frazzled employee and a cluttered inbox.

The best two things I've done for my productivity are:

Checking email only a few times per day (this is a hard habit to break, and I still struggle with it some days)

Slack has helped at Ars, I think, since the barrier to entry is a lot lower than with IRC for folks without a deep tech background (not to pick on Joe, but yeah, it was hard supporting some of the ars staffers with IRC). The end result is more collaboration, and that's mostly a good thing since we're all distributed and we all work from home.

But honestly, slack is a lot less flexible than IRC and I don't like it as much. Their bot integration is weak sauce and not as powerful as IRC bots (in fact, the vast majority of our bot functionality is still done with an IRC bot that hooks into slack via its IRC gateway). Slack really is just IRC + instant messaging + cloud storage for files, all rolled into one app—with the added bonus of taking control of your messaging out of your hands and putting it into the hands of a 3rd party company that might or might not be compelled by LEOs or other entities to release your data without telling you.

And the whole "we keep all of your logs but you have to be on a paid plan to see them" sucks. I mean, I get it—it's a great revenue hook!—but even at $7 a head per month for the cheapest paid plan, we'd be in the hole for thousands of dollars per year if we were subscribing. And that's, shit, I don't know, 20x the cost of maintaining our own IRC server at our colo, even with admin overhead factored in. The value prop is super SUPER weak.

So I guess I am a reluctant slacker. It's good we're using it, because it's lowered communication friction and gotten more authors participating in the daily news flow, but IMO it's just flat-out inferior to IRC and XMPP IM.

edited to add - and there is no way in hell slack could "replace" email, even internally. Email at ars is the official way of communicating anything of importance, since it leaves a record. Slack is for ephemeral blahblah stuff. Slack can certainly cut down on the need to use email for every bit of talking, but it's insane to think of it as an email replacement.

Like some others, I found this to be remarkably difficult article to read. Let me try to explain why:

This article starts off in the first person perspective and implies a current timeframe (ie, "I" is Annalee's perspective, and she is visiting Slack's HQ).

The next section "Spawn of IRC" goes to a third-party perspective, that of Henderson, about the initial development of Slack back in 2012.

The section after that, "Social Media Goes to Work" starts off from an editorial perspective and moves back to summarize things in 2007.

"Inside the Slackmines" goes back to Annalee's first-person perspective about her work experience back in 2007 as a remote employee, and then blithely switches over to using Slack as of 2 and a half years ago. And then mixes in a bit about giphy and Megan Geuss and quoting a chat about yak fact stuff, only Annalee hadn't joined Ars in that timeframe-- that would be the next section.

"Transitioning to Slack" jumps us to Annalee/1st person as of three months ago joining Ars, then "The myth of more productivity" goes back into editorial perspective and talks about data from 2011 and 2014.

I could keep going, but I hope the point is clear. If you try to review this story from a chronological perspective, it's a mess. And switching between first, third, and editorial perspectives at whim doesn't help coherency much either.

The problem is that Slack is great for companies that don't deal with external parties a lot, or for small groups within a company. As soon as you add the need to interact with other vendors or customers into the mix, the promise to "replace" email evaporates into thin air. The few mechanisms they have for interacting with email are clunky and more time consuming than just dealing directly with email.

It's a better form of Microsoft Lync or other IM platforms but it is not a replacement for email in its entirety. Can it make internal communication more efficient and productive? I think that depends on the use case....closed software development teams that don't interact with outside parties? Excellent. Need to communicate outside the firm? More trouble that it is worth, IMHO.

I say this as the person that pushed Slack heavily on my company a year or so ago, and watched it fizzle out and die.

I was going to state this, but will now add; five people sitting at their desks typing away is much slower than five people meeting face-to-face in order to hash things out. I'm all for minimizing meetings, but this platform can be a barrier for complex thinking/tasks.

I's good for people who don't like a lot of physical interaction, or people in general.And it's true "popularity" is suspect to silicon inflation.

I work as a Federal contractor in the D.C. area and I can tell you there is ZERO interest in this type of software by workers. They tried to roll out yammer and except for the occasional whatever it's called in yammer (yam?) it's a ghost town.

I have a really hard time explaining the benefits of this type software to people used to email/sharepoint, etc. Also of the people I do show it to, they say it feels unprofessional and the word "slack" immediately conjures up "slacking" as in not doing your job.

I'm a tech person so I think this stuff is pretty cool, but there are industries where it's a VERY tough sell

Yammer doesn't have a desktop client with notifications. So it's useless as an IRC/chat/slack replacement.

How is explaining 'like text messaging, but on your computer' hard?.

I think what will happen is Lync will come in the back door as a VOIP replacement and people will discover the benefit of the Chat function as well. I had Lync 2013 at my old job, nothing like it here except the useless Yammer and miss it dearly.

The problem is that Slack is great for companies that don't deal with external parties a lot, or for small groups within a company. As soon as you add the need to interact with other vendors or customers into the mix, the promise to "replace" email evaporates into thin air. The few mechanisms they have for interacting with email are clunky and more time consuming than just dealing directly with email.

It's a better form of Microsoft Lync or other IM platforms but it is not a replacement for email in its entirety. Can it make internal communication more efficient and productive? I think that depends on the use case....closed software development teams that don't interact with outside parties? Excellent. Need to communicate outside the firm? More trouble that it is worth, IMHO.

I say this as the person that pushed Slack heavily on my company a year or so ago, and watched it fizzle out and die.

I was going to state this, but will now add; five people sitting at their desks typing away is much slower than five people meeting face-to-face in order to hash things out. I'm all for minimizing meetings, but this platform can be a barrier for complex thinking/tasks.

I's good for people who don't like a lot of physical interaction, or people in general.And it's true "popularity" is suspect to silicon inflation.

That depends on how long the flights are to get those 5 people together...

The problem is that Slack is great for companies that don't deal with external parties a lot, or for small groups within a company. As soon as you add the need to interact with other vendors or customers into the mix, the promise to "replace" email evaporates into thin air. The few mechanisms they have for interacting with email are clunky and more time consuming than just dealing directly with email.

It's a better form of Microsoft Lync or other IM platforms but it is not a replacement for email in its entirety. Can it make internal communication more efficient and productive? I think that depends on the use case....closed software development teams that don't interact with outside parties? Excellent. Need to communicate outside the firm? More trouble that it is worth, IMHO.

I say this as the person that pushed Slack heavily on my company a year or so ago, and watched it fizzle out and die.

I was going to state this, but will now add; five people sitting at their desks typing away is much slower than five people meeting face-to-face in order to hash things out. I'm all for minimizing meetings, but this platform can be a barrier for complex thinking/tasks.

I's good for people who don't like a lot of physical interaction, or people in general.And it's true "popularity" is suspect to silicon inflation.

That depends on how long the flights are to get those 5 people together...

Videoconferencing was suppose to address the "face to face" aspect of communications.

Well, I was curious to know what Slack was besides a Linux distro and ended up installing the Telegram desktop client instead. Several of us at work already use Telegram and adding the desktop client seems like good way to try this out.

I pay for Slack to actually alter the retention to shorter time frames. From their settings:

"Message Retention

By default, Slack will save your message data for the lifetime of your team. You can configure a custom message retention policy type and duration.

Note that Message Retention policies do not apply to files your team uploads to Slack. Admins and file owners can delete files directly in the File Listing.

An important note about custom message retention policiesSetting a custom duration for message retention means that messages in your team's archives will be deleted after the number of days you set. This deletion is permanent and the messages will be irretrievable. Please proceed with caution! "

HipChat, Atlassian's version of enterprise chat. It certainly hasn't eliminated email, however, it's become a pipeline for "now" information.

I'm on a team that has leveraged HipChat with great success for nearly four years. Gave Slack a quick test drive today and see absolutely no possible benefit to use in a move away from HipChat. How on Earth did this ridiculous hype machine article even happen?!

Slack offers Ars Technica's staff some useful tools that our prior IRC system didn't. I love having notifications tracked across multiple devices, and I really love having search functionality that spans multiple channels. This is particularly useful for staffers on opposite coasts who wake up or log off at different times and stumble across news stories in their usual RSS or web-browsing ways. Sometimes I'll see a story that's in my beat and search for relevant words on our Slack feed, only to find another staffer has talked about it in a way that's relevant to its potential future coverage. That's as close as we spread-across-the-world reporters get to having a newsroom-like experience of informal "how should we cover this?" chat.

However, a news org like Ars is wary by default of handing over so much internal dialogue to a third party, and I'd much rather Slack make their service installable on a company's own servers. We're not hurting for the bandwidth/storage half of the equation, and I'd love it if Slack could cut a company a deal on a maintenance-only, run-it-yourself version.

Until that happens, the 10,000-message limit on free accounts doesn't make me want our company to pay up; it makes me want to give up some of Slack's best features in exchange for just going back to IRC (and perhaps beefing up our mobile/portable client with some of the notification functionality that Slack does so well). Emojis and inline image support are fun, but I don't need them to do better work. All I need is as much emulation of the real-life work experience as a messaging app can possibly provide—and if some contender comes along with smooth project-management tools and calendar support baked in, I could imagine Slack getting dropped like a bad habit.

The problem is that Slack is great for companies that don't deal with external parties a lot, or for small groups within a company. As soon as you add the need to interact with other vendors or customers into the mix, the promise to "replace" email evaporates into thin air. The few mechanisms they have for interacting with email are clunky and more time consuming than just dealing directly with email.

It's a better form of Microsoft Lync or other IM platforms but it is not a replacement for email in its entirety. Can it make internal communication more efficient and productive? I think that depends on the use case....closed software development teams that don't interact with outside parties? Excellent. Need to communicate outside the firm? More trouble that it is worth, IMHO.

I say this as the person that pushed Slack heavily on my company a year or so ago, and watched it fizzle out and die.

I was going to state this, but will now add; five people sitting at their desks typing away is much slower than five people meeting face-to-face in order to hash things out. I'm all for minimizing meetings, but this platform can be a barrier for complex thinking/tasks.

I's good for people who don't like a lot of physical interaction, or people in general.And it's true "popularity" is suspect to silicon inflation.

That depends on how long the flights are to get those 5 people together...

Videoconferencing was suppose to address the "face to face" aspect of communications.

Even voice is faster than most people's typing. If you are having an actual meeting, text is not an efficient way to do it. Text is more convenient if you are multitasking, which is to say if you are not giving the conversation too much attention, since you can come back and catch up. But often having a focused meeting less often is better than being unfocused all the time.

I'm on a team that has leveraged HipChat with great success for nearly four years. Gave Slack a quick test drive today and see absolutely no possible benefit to use in a move away from HipChat. How on Earth did this ridiculous hype machine article even happen?!

Just because you see no benefit doesn't mean no benefits exist for anyone.

I find the native IRC gateway to be an enormous benefit over HipChat's sometimes quirky use of XMPP. Multi-party direct messages (instead of having to spin up an entire new room just to ask 2 people a question), and some other minor things.

However, a news org like Ars is wary by default of handing over so much internal dialogue to a third party, and I'd much rather Slack make their service installable on a company's own servers. We're not hurting for the bandwidth/storage half of the equation, and I'd love it if Slack could cut a company a deal on a maintenance-only, run-it-yourself version.

Indeed-- I've always questioned the notion of outsourcing your most critical business functions to a third party. If something is vital to the continuing operation of the business, it either needs to stay in-house, or the service provider needs to have a sterling reputation and provide SLAs backed up with financial coverage adequate to cover the potential losses.

Oddly enough, while this article talks about Slack replacing the office, it never covers this aspect. I had to hunt down the following page:

...which states that Slack will only provide a service credit, which is capped at 30 days. Their maximum direct liability is $0 and their maximum service credit would be $7 * 30 per user, or $210 per user.

Anyway, anyone in the medical/healthcare industry, anyone in financial/banking sector, or anyone facing PCI DSS audits are not going to be likely to use Slack until they manage to offer a self-hosted solution.

And the whole "we keep all of your logs but you have to be on a paid plan to see them" sucks. I mean, I get it—it's a great revenue hook!—but even at $7 a head per month for the cheapest paid plan, we'd be in the hole for thousands of dollars per year if we were subscribing. And that's, shit, I don't know, 20x the cost of maintaining our own IRC server at our colo, even with admin overhead factored in. The value prop is super SUPER weak.

The free viewing of only your last 10k messages have made it marginal at best for large student teams. With Badgerloop, that only covers the last two weeks at the most.